Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

success in NLP – and then applying it to yourself or teaching it to others is what is referred to asmodelling and this is the sort of ‘copying’ I advocate in the classroom. Find a student who has done well in a given aspect of a subject and not only find out how but help them to find out how too. Once the metacognitive ‘secrets of their success’ are better understood they can be better transmitted to other students in the class too.
    I have not yet come across a school that brings together a ‘focus group’ of students who did well in their exams and ones who didn’t and really pick their brains about what went right and what went wrong. By learning the metacognitive secrets of the highest achieving students and teaching others to use their strategies, you are not only teaching children to pass their exams, you are also teaching them
how
to pass their exams. Not only that, as we will see in the next chapter, you could also be teaching them to
remember
to pass their exams.

Chapter 25
Remember to succeed
    We have fantastic memories. You do (although it does deteriorate with age). Your students do. The reason they forget what you think you have taught them is not because they have poor memories, although many students think that is the case and grow up into adults who feel they have lousy memories too. They forget because the learning was not
memorable
. We spend a great deal of time teaching children things but never seem to spend any time helping them to remember what we have taught them. Yet memorizing key information is one of the easiest parts of the learning cycle and can be one of the most fun if you take rote learning out of the equation (although not altogether because it does work).
    To what extent, if at all, are you helping young people remember what you have been teaching them? To what extent have you addressed the ‘hidden question’ I mentioned in
Essential Motivation
that is there every time you say to a group, ‘Now go away and learn this and I’ll test you tomorrow’, which is ‘
How
shall I go away and learn this so you can test me tomorrow?’ Yet I see it time and time again – teach a child how to remember the information, then test them and that child will perform well.
    What’s more, there are two big benefits from teaching children memory strategies. One is that, obviously, it improves their memory. The second is that it has a direct impact on their self-esteem. Remember in chapter 16 I said that you can’t raise someone’s self-esteem? What you can do, however, is set up the opportunities that allow people’s self-esteem to grow. If I say to an individual or a class, especially a bottom set group, ‘Guess what, you all have great memories’, then they not only won’t believe me, they will also have the data to back up their refutation of my claim. All they would need to do is to show me their test results for the last however many years of school. However, if I simply teach them a strategy, test them and allow them to get ten out of ten they will see for themselves what they are capable of. And, in my experience, they often soon see thebigger picture of, ‘If I can do that what else can I do … ?’ Research has found that learning new things actually helps strengthen your brain and that this is all the more effective if you
believe
you can learn new things. People who have what is known as a ‘growth mindset’ 1 have higher levels of brain plasticity. In other words, by reassuring children that they can learn and proving to them how powerful their brains really are, we actually help grow their brains.
    Some people have said, me included, that we remember every little thing that ever happened to us, that it all goes in and stays there somewhere, but we have trouble getting it out when we need it. Research is now showing, though, that our memory isn’t quite as eidetic as that, as pointed out in a fascinating paper entitled the
Seven Sins of Memory
by memory researcher Daniel Schacter. He describes seven ways in which our memories can let us down, the first three –‘transience’ where memories slip over time and with age; ‘absent-mindedness’ where you forget where you put the scissors and go looking for them where you had them last and then forget what you were looking for and so go back to the room where you started and remember that this was about scissors and then you go to where you think you last saw them making scissor movements with your fingers;